๐ 13. Findings of the week
Concrete tips that will help you in your UX career, a tool to practice UX, typical challenges you may face in your work and how to solve them...
Read time: 5 minutes.
Hi ๐
How are you doing? We just started a new UX mission as a freelancer. We're really excited about it and everything we're going to learn. If you'd like some freelance tips, we can also cover them in other findings.
Without further ado, here are the findings of the week, quite long but very interesting!
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Break into UX ๐ป
Concrete tips that will help you in your UX career
We know, finding a job in UX can be tiring, frustrating and we are often discouraged after applying over and over again, in vain. We understand you completely. That's why we're looking for ressources that can help you get through it. Today we found this article that gives us 6 tips to help us better manage our early career.
Be confident and ask for help: a misconception that juniors may have is that you have to come up with THE solution, innovative and hyper creative. Also, that you have to know everything. The reality is that no one, not even seniors, have the answers to everything. Remember that as a UX designer, your job is to gather information and find solutions. Do the same when you don't understand something on a daily basis. Ask for help from more experienced people who will help you move forward more quickly.
Focus on impact: at the beginning of a project, everyone has an idea of how the product should be. There are long debates and conversations, which can of course be constructive. But don't get overwhelmed and distracted by it all. "Instead, figure out a way to help move the project forward and work with your stakeholder to prioritize your effort."
Grow your storytelling skills: at the beginning of your career, you may think that you absolutely must have good visual skills and that your good designs will speak for themselves. This is a very good thing but what is equally important is your ability to justify your designs. You're going to present your designs to stakeholders, so it's important to be able to communicate them well.
Look at problems from other perspectives: itโs very common as a designer to be attached to an idea, to not always receive criticism well but keep in mind that criticism is not against you and can help you see the problem from different angles and help you find other solutions that you didnโt think of.
Stay true to your values: very often, we can focus our motivation on external factors (a prestigious job title) but in the long run it can be exhausting. Focus instead on your why, why did you choose to be a UX? This will give you the motivation to keep going when things get tough around you.
Work smart and avoid burn out: find a way to work smart. Working hard is not necessarily synonymous with efficiency. At the beginning of your career, you tend to do a sprint and quickly burn out. UX is a marathon and to be effective in your work, you need to be in great shape and not exhausted and burned out so breathe and take some time for yourself!
A concept explained โ๏ธ
Typical challenges you may face in your work and how to solve them
A bit like the previous article, this one gives us tips on how to deal with the challenges we can face in UX projects.
Misconceptions about what you do: one of the biggest challenges you can have as a junior UX designer is the lack of understanding of what you do. UX is a multidisciplinary field and others don't really understand what it is. The problem comes when stakeholders also don't know what you do and what your role is. Even worse, if they think you're there just to "make the design look good."
The solution: set your expectations early on. Start every project with a kick-off meeting where you explain what you are going to do and why. Then throughout the project, communicate with the stakeholders.Conducting research under time and budget constraints: sometimes you may find yourself with little money or time to do research. Worse, the client asks to skip the research. NEVER skip research. But sometimes the CEO is hard to convince.
What to do? Find a way to do research at a lower cost. You have that resource if you need it.Decide on the problem you are going to solve: by digging into your insights, you will discover other problems.
The solution: you may know this but D. Norman points out that "a brilliant solution to the wrong problem can be worse than no solution at all." So as a UX designer, it's important to always try to really understand the real problem and not try to solve it directly.Bridging the gap between design and development: the collaboration between them is crucial. But often challenging.
The solution: communicate from the beginning. Involve as much as possible the developers in your design in order to quickly identify potential problems.Navigating the ever-changing landscape of UX job titles: new job titles often emerge in the field and can confuse you. Positioning yourself in the market can be quite difficult.
The solution: stay on top of the new roles companies are asking for, list the skills and develop them. This will help you market yourself better.
Cool tools for you โจ
#1 Cool icons for your health projects
#2 UX challenges, to practice your analytical skills
Weekly inspirations โก๏ธ
#1 Zixianโs portfolio
Zixian is a product designer who previously worked at Meta and Tencent. You can check out his very interesting portfolio!
#2 Product selection
While Arc is not yet available on Windows, we suggest you discover an alternative with Ulaa. It's an alternative browser to Google chrome that offers ad blockers and does not share your data, a work mode to stay focused!
Juniorโs jobs
Europe ๐
UX/UI Designer - Accenture - Prague, Czech Republic
Junior Product Designer (UX/UI) - DAZN - Katowice, Poland
America ๐
UX Designer - American auto Shield - Brandon, FL, USA
UI Designer - TekSystem, Winston Salem, USA
Asia ๐
UI/UX designer - Reckonsys Tech Labs, Bengaluru, Karnataka, India
UX Designer (1 Year Contract) - Sephora - Singapour
Africa ๐
UXUI Designer - Snaphunt Remote, Congo
UI UX Design, Olive global limited - Lagos, Nigeria
Thatโs all! Thank you for reading.
If you have a question, weโll answer it in the next newsletter. Feel free to ask it here.
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See you on the next news,
Mialy and Michel